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Staten Island Rising

Staten Island Rising

A wide bay may separate Staten Island from the rest of the city. But in terms of real estate, differences between the borough and other enclaves seem to be lifting like a morning fog.

New rentals and condominiums, some with perks like a pet spa or rooftop beehives, are rewriting the island’s skyline. Big-city cool is popping up in a place not always noted for it: Small-batch espresso will soon flow at a coffee shop; a jug band played kazoos at a recently opened brewery; and stores selling brand-name skinny-leg pants are on their way. And a fresh crop of renters and buyers, unable to afford pricier precincts and unfazed by stereotypes about how the place can seem insular, bland or run-down, are setting sail for the island.

“I like the small-town vibe,” said Joseph Bird, 27, who moved to the Stapleton neighborhood from Brooklyn in December. “And I don’t mind that there’s a little bit of grit.”

Not all of Staten Island, a 58-square-mile borough shaped like a slice of pizza with 470,000 people, is getting equal attention. Developers are mostly targeting a bite-size portion in the northeastern corner, encompassing the waterfront neighborhoods of Stapleton, St. George, Tompkinsville and Clifton, all part of what is often called the North Shore.

The focus seems to make sense: Not only is the area near the ferry to Manhattan, but it is served by the Staten Island Railway, which connects to the ferry terminal in St. George. Developers are betting that transplants will prefer to travel the way people do elsewhere in the city, using public transportation as much as possible. Neighborhoods farther west are primarily automobile territory.

Some developments have been years in the making and unable to stay on schedule, which developers and brokers say has in turn delayed the gentrification of surrounding blocks. But if the pace of progress has been halting, this year could mark a turning point, with major projects starting construction, hundreds of new apartments coming to market, and online searches for Staten Island homes jumping off the charts — a strong indicator of future sales.

Last week, groundbreaking ceremonies took place for a $350 million project in St. George: Empire Outlets, a mall and entertainment complex. The New York Wheel, a 630-foot-tall Ferris wheel that has been compared with the London Eye, also was to break ground in St. George last week, but at the last minute announced a delay. Richard A. Marin, the president of the company formed to develop the $500 million project, said he had about $200 million in loans and equity in place, but hundreds of millions in other loans still have to be finalized. “I will get my moment in the sun in a few weeks,” he said.

The outlets, the first of their kind in the city, are taking aim at the hordes of foreign tourists who ride the ferries for views of the Statue of Liberty. The project has already been marketed in Germany, Italy and France, with a similar push planned for more than a dozen other countries, according to project officials.

But the sloping eight-acre site, developed by a team led by BFC Partners, will replace the massive parking lots that now sever much of the neighborhood’s downtown from its waterfront.

The outlet project, to open next year, will include wide paths, benches and fountains and give local residents something more attractive to look at than parked cars, said Donald A. Capoccia, BFC’s managing principal. (Mr. Capoccia promises to replace all those parking spaces and then some.)

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A rendering of Empire Outlets, going up next to St. George Terminal. The New York Wheel, the 630-foot Ferris wheel at right, should break ground soon.Credit
SHoP Architects

About 30 percent of the 340,000 square feet of retail space at the outlets is now leased to stores, including Nordstrom Rack, H & M, Banana Republic Factory Store, a Walgreens pharmacy, Nathan’s Famous hot dogs and Obey Your Body, a cosmetics company.

These stores will occupy a series of boxy, low-slung buildings terraced upward toward the columned facade of the Richmond County Courthouse, which is among several architecturally striking government buildings in St. George.

Mr. Capoccia points out that he did not just step off a ferry yesterday; his Staten Island developments include affordable housing in Stapleton. He owns a large plot there, near the waterfront, where he hopes to put up apartments after the city acts on its promise to rezone a 14-block stretch to allow for taller buildings.

“What’s happening here is not developer-driven,” said Mr. Capoccia, who started his career in the East Village in the 1980s and later planted his flag in other neighborhoods before they became gentrified, including Downtown Brooklyn. “The developers are following people here, there’s no question about that.”

Of course, before people can toss a Frisbee on any lawns, they need places to live, and while new housing has been slow to roll out in St. George, a dazzling option will soon be unveiled in Stapleton.

Rising on a desolate stretch of waterfront is URL Staten Island, short for “Urban Ready Life,” a $250 million mixed-use project with about 900 rental apartments in a series of buildings resembling factories, with bands of windows and flat roofs, the better to house bee hives.

The first phase, with 571 studios, one-bedrooms and two-bedrooms, will open this fall. Interiors will feature stone counters and bamboo floors, plus stacked washers and dryers. Studios will likely start around $1,600 a month, and two-bedrooms at $2,800, said David Barry, the president of Ironstate Development, the developer.

The site will contain 35,000 square feet of retail space, more than half of which is now leased. Among the future tenants are a pizzeria, a store dedicated to specialty olive oils and Lola Star, a Coney Island clothing shop that is soon to open a branch in that other rising outpost, the Rockaways. Coffeed, a chain that brewed its first cup in Long Island City, Queens, will also be there.

National chain stores, such as those that dot Staten Island’s strip malls, are not welcome at URL. “This place has its own special character,” Mr. Barry said. “The stores should reflect that.”

URL will also have a 5,000-square-foot plot planted with vegetables that can be purchased from an on-site farm stand. Or, for a fee, residents will be able to request that its kale, spinach, rainbow chard and mizuna be prepared by a chef who will do double duty as the head farmer, said Mr. Barry, who was sifting through résumés for the post as he spoke.

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A view of URL Staten Island, a new residential and retail complex rising in the Stapleton neighborhood, from the Stapleton platform of the Staten Island Railway. URL overlooks Upper New York Bay.Credit
Edwin J. Torres for The New York Times

Simultaneously, the city is spending $32 million to improve the look of Stapleton streets as well as create a leafy three-and-a-half acre esplanade that will rim the harbor’s edge, like that of Battery Park City in Manhattan.

On the site of the Homeport naval base, URL Staten Island represents the culmination of years of effort to reinvent a rough-and-tumble industrial area.

At the moment, barbed wire tops fences under elevated train tracks; a purple octopus by a graffiti artist bares its fangs at passers-by. Shuttered storefronts are common on commercial strips along Bay Street and around Stapleton Park.

Whether URL can provide a spark for the larger neighborhood remains to be seen. But change seems to be arriving incrementally in the meantime.

New restaurants, for instance, are staking out claims. The River Dock Cafe joined a Dairy Queen at the St. George ferry terminal this winter, and is serving lobster in a sleek, spacious dining room with bay views. At around the same time, a branch of Defonte’s, a sandwich shop that has been a mainstay of Red Hook, Brooklyn, for decades, opened across from Tappen Park in Stapleton, making supersize heroes like the “Italian Stallion,” with prosciutto, mozzarella and fried eggplant.

In Mr. Barry’s eyes, the table has been set. “I think it is just a matter of creating a little street life, to get some more bodies on the street,” he said. “This place has great assets.”

Less far along than URL, but similarly ambitious, is Lighthouse Point, a mixed-use complex planned for St. George that will tuck retail and apartment buildings into the brick campus of the United States Lighthouse Service Depot, where Fresnel lenses were housed. Elysa Goldman, the director of development for Triangle Equities, the developer, suggested that the depot’s crypt-like underground vaults, where flammable oil was kept, could become cheese caves or wine cellars for restaurants.

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Originally scheduled to break ground this spring, and now delayed until late summer, the complex will initially include a 12-story, 116-unit apartment tower with stores, offices and restaurants at its base.

Other buildings in the $200 million project will come later, including a hotel whose lobby will incorporate one of the lighthouse buildings, Ms. Goldman said. The project will wrap up by 2018, she said.

Yes, Staten Island has a bit of a public relations problem, Ms. Goldman said, adding, “until you get someone on the ferry. Then you pull up to this beautiful place, with this beautiful architecture, and you say to yourself, ‘How could I possibly be in New York?’ ”

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A rendering of the Lighthouse Point project in St. George, which will mix historic brick buildings and glassy high-rises on a waterfront site. A United States Lighthouse Service Depot once operated there.Credit
Triangle Equities.

Though it can take some time, projects here do eventually seem to coalesce.

The Bay Street Landing complex in St. George, a former warehouse-lined shipping area for cocoa beans, for instance, began to reinvent itself as a gated community in the 1980s and is just finishing up now, with the 100-unit Accolade, a conversion of a warehouse.

But interest from prospective buyers is more intense this time around than with the other phases, brokers say.

Of the 75 or so units that have sold at the Accolade since winter 2014, more than 20 were to buyers from Brooklyn and Manhattan, according to a spokesman for the project, with 42 from Staten Island, and the rest from outside New York, perhaps drawn by the pet spa, the golf simulator and the lawn with Adirondack chairs and barbecue grills. In mid-April, studios started at $325,000; one-bedrooms started at $410,000.

By contrast, in the first quarter of this year in Manhattan, studios in new buildings sold for an average of $787,000, said Jonathan J. Miller, the president of Miller Samuel, the appraisal firm. At the same time, newly constructed one-bedrooms there went for an average of $1.15 million.

Of course, the island still has an off-the-map image and can be proud of it. The Flagship Brewing Company, whose motto is “unforgettable beer brewed in the forgotten borough,” opened last year in Tompkinsville. And Erich von Hasseln, 25, an art student, is among those who aren’t eager for their haven to be discovered any time soon.

“You always have to look where everybody else is not. It’s a survival mechanism if you’re an artist,” said Mr. von Hasseln of his move to Staten Island in 2014 from Ridgewood, Queens, after a stint in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

Cost was a major force for that move, said Mr. von Hasseln, who is studying printmaking in Manhattan.

Next month, he will move to an apartment in a wood-frame house with a gambrel roof in Stapleton; he and a roommate will divide the rent of $1,400 a month.

Mr. von Hasseln has also found low-cost studio space on the island but refused to say where, lest the area be overrun with fellow artists.

His commuting costs are low. He rides his bike to and from the ferry in every season except winter. As of May 1, those ferries will run more frequently during the wee hours.

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A ferry at rest in St. George, at the island's terminal. Trips from there to Manhattan take about 25 minutes and along the way, pass the Statue of Liberty.Credit
Edwin J. Torres for The New York Times

More routes may be coming. Earlier this year, Mayor Bill de Blasio proposed ferry service directly to Stapleton as part of an expansion of service citywide, though Stapleton-bound boats will sail only on paper until 2019 at the earliest.

For Mr. von Hasseln, who grew up in rural upstate New York, Staten Island has one other thing going for it — a lack of obsession with of-the-moment night life: “I got tired of living somewhere that was really hip,” he said.

It’s not just artists who are concerned with the bottom line. Mr. Bird, the Stapleton buyer, had his heart set on Ditmas Park in Brooklyn, known for its grand Victorian houses. But they were listed for as much as $4 million, he said.

With around $600,000 to spend, he and his fiancée, Maria Elena Rubino, 23, an analyst at Goldman Sachs, also looked in Brooklyn Heights. But that kind of money bought only a one-bedroom there, Mr. Bird said.

But on St. Paul’s Avenue in Stapleton, a historic district, the couple found a shingle and clapboard 1880s house with numerous porches and six bedrooms, for $620,000.

“My friends in Manhattan all live over banks and pharmacies, and you don’t see that here,” he said.

In 2014, 31 one- and two-family homes sold in Stapleton, at an average price of $245,000, according to data from the Staten Island Board of Realtors prepared by Richard Mohr, its controller. That was up from the 27 that sold in 2013, at an average of $221,000, he said.

Similarly, in Tompkinsville, six houses sold in 2014 at an average of $319,000, versus three in 2013 at an average of $222,000, according to the data. In Clifton, meanwhile, 29 houses sold in 2014 at an average of $227,000, the data show, versus 24 in 2013 at $225,000.

This year, interest from prospective buyers and renters appears to be on the upswing, as indicated by searches and clicks on nytimes.com:

From April 2014 to March 2015, searches for Staten Island homes for sale jumped 62 percent, while views of specific properties soared by 128 percent. In the same time frame, searches for rental units shot up 81 percent; clicks on specific rental properties increased 39 percent.

From February to March, searches of all Staten Island homes for sale jumped 54 percent. Also from February to March, clicks on specific homes for sale increased more than in any other borough, going up by 102 percent, as opposed to a 6 percent increase in Brooklyn, according to New York Times data.

Sari Kingsley, who moved from Crown Heights to Staten Island four decades ago and today owns Kingsley Real Estate, joked that it used to be “traumatic” for Brooklynites to move to the borough. Now, she said, Staten Island is becoming a viable choice for a younger crowd. “It was a borough that was sleepy but has woken up,” Ms. Kingsley said. “And we deserved to wake up already.”

All this yawning and stretching is influencing people who might otherwise have moved away to stay.

Michael Napolitano, 31, an investment banker who grew up in Eltingville, for instance, was considering buying in New Jersey. But in the end, he chose a one-bedroom at the Accolade.

“There’s a lot of buzz about us right now,” he said. “I’m glad to see this place is finally getting the attention it deserves.”

A version of this article appears in print on April 19, 2015, on Page RE1 of the New York edition with the headline: An Island’s Turning Point?. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe